You don't have to change much to change everything

In Invasion's block they tried to push players to play with as many colors as possible in the same deck. They made cards that interacted with multiple colors to reinforce the multicolored theme. However, the block suffered from poor mana base that didn't quite allow for multicolored decks and there was an excessive complexity in regards to mechanics and interaction between cards. When they made Ravnica they took a different approach to multicolor decks. Mark tried to go in the opposite direction of Invasion. Rather than pushing towards as many colors as possible, push as few combinations as possible, two colors per deck. They had the idea of making a world where the five colors are arranged in ten pairs. The creative team decided to build a city world and each pair would be tied to a guild, each guild having the same power and level of importance as the others.

Ravnica was a huge success and many argue that it's the best world ever made. The fact that the world was later revisited twice proved its success. Invasion block pushed in many different directions at the same time, which added to complexity and didn't help the players play with all five colors. On the other hand, Ravnica focused on giving a strong identity to each color pair and it succeeded. Each guild had a strong connection to its colors.

Mark resorts to a metaphor about cooking at home. He isn't a good cooker but his wife is. One of his jobs is to take care of frozen peas. He never knows how many peas he has to cook. He always puts more and more peas, until he realizes that he made too many peas. In his view, designers make the same mistake as him. They always want more and more, until the game is overly complicated. They added too much to Invasion and ended up with an overly complicated block.

He started to take a different approach, thinking "How little do I have to add?" instead of "How much more?". Under this new perspective a designer has to think how much do they have to remove until the game's core remains intact. In other words, you want to cook the right number of peas. I make an addendum here. There isn't an exact number of peas, there is a margin for error. And there isn't an exact way of predicting a game's success. Mark called this lesson "you don't have to change much to change everything", but his metaphor of peas is more about quantity than quality. Overall, he is talking more about quality than quantity though.

Take a look at Path of Exile. This game has a high level of complexity and its philosophy is to always add more content. It has the same complexity creep issue of magic because there is an ever increasing amount of mechanics. Looking back at Invasion, what did they do with the multicolor theme? They added in many mechanics to push towards as many interactions between different colors as possible. With Ravnica they took a different approach, limit the card's interactions to pairs of colors. Mark's lesson is that with a more focused approach the interactions between each colors became both more meaningful and stronger at the same time. That's his metaphor of cooking the right number of peas.

In level design the metaphor of cooking the right number of peas would mean that a game has to have levels of a certain size and a certain number of levels. If there are too many levels the game becomes boring at a certain point. If a level is too large it also becomes boring at a certain point. There isn't an unlimited room for ideas and putting too many ideas in a level leads to high complexity. There is a temptation to make games or levels last longer, but if you stretch it beyond a threshold you risk exhausting yourself and/or the players. When a level is too long and repeats the same mechanics over and over, it either has to be reduced or split into different levels.

I must say that I often felt the same way as Mark. I was making a level and would often see myself adding more and more details to it, until it became too cluttered and I had to remove things. With peas you can't "uncook" them, but with level design or any design of a game we can remove things. Suppose I made a level for Counter Strike. If I were to make it more focused I'd have to remove objects, decoration, paths, many different things to bring the level down to its core components. That's Mark's lesson about changing his perspective from adding more peas to adding as little as possible. To keep up with his cooking metaphor, think about salt. Excess of salt is hard, if not impossible, to remove from food. That's why we add as little as we can, because we can have better control over how much salt to add.

Credits: P.B. Horror Gaming

F.E.A.R. for example. The water treatment facility spans across five levels. In the evil company's headquarters that is at the centre of the plot there are nine levels, from the office rooms till the research facilities. That repetition of environments was addressed in the second game, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. In the sequel they avoided repetition and made sure that the game visited many different environments.

2013's Shadow Warrior is another example. The game doesn't suffer from repetition of environments, but from repetition of enemies. The game gets boring because it repeats the same enemies and combats over and over from start to finish. 2009's Wolfenstein suffers from the same issue as Shadow Warrior, even though its level design is excellent. Alan Wake too, the same types of enemies and the game gets boring because of that. F.E.A.R. had two expansions, with the first continuing the game from where the original left and the second telling a parallel story. Apart from some new enemies and weapons, both expansions just brought more of the same to the F.E.A.R. universe.

If you think on how complex Path of Exile is, their recipe of success is tied to that complexity. As Mark's own lesson teaches, Path of Exile has a lot of room for players to explore and discover new things. The excessive number of spells and mechanics does have a purpose for Path of Exile's environment. It's about giving the players as many tools and choices as they want to experiment with. Shadow Warrior 2 offered much more customization and many more weapons compared to the Shadow Warrior 1, but in this case the excess was unneeded. Shadow Warrior isn't an RPG game and having too many choices serves little to no purpose as this game isn't about building your own character. That's the too many peas of Mark's metaphor.

Without professional experience I can't tell how to tackle quantity vs quality. However, I'd agree with Mark that you have to think about the core of a game or a level as in the case of this site's name. By knowing it you are better able to measure the threshold between having too much and too little in a game.